PETER discovered details of his own family, from Tweedsmuir in the Borders, that he had never been aware of.

THE creator of BBC drama The Village has revealed his inspiration now lies sunk beneath the waters of a reservoir in the Scottish Borders.

Bafta-winning writer Peter Moffat wrote the series – which tracks an English
village and its inhabitants across the 20th century – after ­conversations with his dad Jack as he was dying from prostrate cancer.

Peter discovered details of his own family, from Tweedsmuir in the Borders, that he had never been aware of.

Their
lives were far removed from that of the former barrister, who also created legal dramas Criminal Justice and Silks. And he wanted to pay some kind of ­tribute on screen.

He said: “I didn’t really know a lot about my great grandfather or my ­grandfather. Tweedsmuir was where they lived and worked.

“When
my dad got ill, we knew he had finite time to live, and he just started
talking about that stuff and I just became really, really interested in
it. My ­great-grandfather was a shepherd and went to bed when it got dark. He’d get up in the middle of the night to go to work for a bit, then go back to sleep.

“When
it got light, he would get up again, he and his dogs would eat a bowl of porridge and then be out on the hill all day, working. That was his life.

“My life now is north-west London. I have just come out of a coffee shop where everyone is speaking Russian and it’s a million miles from that time and those people.

“My
daughter has just started at Oxford University, studying English literature and she is big into Nabokov. I mean, what? It’s amazing.

“I just thought how weird that I have lost touch with all that stuff and it would be very interesting to look back at that.

“I started with my own family but broadened it out into a more general exploration of that life at that time.”

If
that was the spark which inspired the series, it was ignited when Peter
discovered the cottage in which his forebears had lived in was gone, sunk under Fruid Reservoir, near Moffat, when it opened in 1968.

He said: “The cottage which they lived in isn’t there any more, it’s under a
­reservoir.

“We had family
picnics around there when my dad was posted to Edinburgh with the Army for a couple of years. But I wasn’t too aware of the fact this was my dad and my ancestry in terms of geography, we were just having a picnic and getting wet.”

The Village stars John Simm, Maxine Peake and Juliet Stevenson.

Set
in the Peak District, in Derbyshire, with the first six episodes covering 1914 to 1920, the camera never leaves the village and the impact of all the great social and political events which have shaped modern Britain are told through the people who live there.

BBC

Young Bert (Bill Jones), Joe (Nico Mirallegro), Grace (Maxine Peake) and John (John Simm) in The Village

The character of Bert Middleton, the second oldest man in Britain, plays a key role, living across the entire
hundred years.

Peter
said: “None of the 28 characters is based on anyone I know but what happens, inevitably, is you draw on bits and pieces of your own life and
there are bits of colour which come from my own family.

“My mum Norma, for instance, had her left-handedness beaten out of her at school and that is in the first episode.

“Bert’s story is incredibly different from her story but you use what you’ve got from your own background and you make it up really.

“I hope it is as historically accurate as possible. That was very, very ­important to me.

“Rather
than hitting the books, I went up to Derbyshire and found old people to
talk to and that felt like the right starting point. Then I went to literature and historical reference and that felt like the right way to do it.”

In some ways, it is a pity he didn’t go down the biographical route as his own family’s story is compelling.

His
grandfather left the harsh life of shepherding and the Borders, moving to Leith in Edinburgh. From there, Peter’s dad and mum made the ­monumental leap to Africa.

He
said: “My grandfather moved to work on railways. He moved to Leith, to Prince Regent Street, which still looks remarkably like it would have back then, one of those classic Edinburgh streets with cobbles and a church at the end.

“In that
tenement, there was an old man, who gave my dad a copy of a ­biography of Stanley the explorer and that really got my dad going. He made the really big move. He joined the Colonial Police Force in Tanganyika and went to live in Dar es Salaam.

“He
had just married my mum and off they went. In that classic way, he was the only white person in the police ­station and he was in charge of it.
It was absurd, mad. He was 22 or 23 and this was straight from Leith.

“When
Tanganyika became ­Tanzania, he joined the Army and worked his way up the ranks and eventually became Lieutenant Colonel.

“So I was born feeling like somebody who belongs to the middle class although my dad’s roots were not that at all.”

The
Village allowed Peter to make a nod to the working-class background of his family and was a chance to tell a historical drama from an everyman point of view. It is a shift away from the upper class perspective of so
many ­dramas, such as Downton Abbey.

He said: “With period drama, way too often, that stuff gets left out.

“I
don’t know why, I don’t understand it and it’s a shame because obviously, those lives are full of extraordinary ­stories just as the lives of the posh folk in the big house are extraordinary and interesting. What I have tried to do in The Village is talk about everybody. I am not saying this is a working-class history. I am saying this is history with everybody in it, that’s the important thing about it.”

Peter, whose dad died almost three years ago, never had a chance to settle anywhere himself as
his father’s Army career kept the family on the move.

He considers himself a Londoner, where
he lives with his wife and two children, but there is a reminder of where he has come from in his home – a shepherd’s crook which was left to him by his dad.

He said: “Every two years we moved. So
we were in Hong Kong, Germany, Aden, Northern Ireland, two years in Edinburgh but it was itinerant really.

“I’m a Londoner now, I’ve been here 20 years, but my childhood had no base really, no home and certainly no ­village.

“My dad had a shepherd’s crook, which he passed on to me.

“It
was a great uncle’s, who had the same initials as my dad, JLM. My father was John, known as Jack Moffat but his middle name was Laidlaw. I
never really knew what the initials meant before.”